Inside LabourStart

August is almost over and with it the end of the long summer holidays that have largely shut down parts of the global trade union movement.

We expect a surge in activity from early next week, right after the Labo(u)r Day holiday in the US and Canada.

We’ll kick off next week with a major fundraising appeal focussing on recent victories that our campaigns helped contribute to, including in the Philippines and Turkey. (And we’ll probably also mention reports we’ve gotten about the effect of our recent campaign in Azerbaijan as well.)

And despite it being a relatively slow month for labour news, our volunteer correspondents posted 2,600 news stories in the first 28 days of the month, or 93 per day on average.

Philippines Kawasaki campaign: The campaign has been translated into nearly 20 languages with more on the way. After a week online, it has 3,994 supporters.

After one week online, we did a followup mailing to our 80,878 subscribers to the English list. We also re-shared the campaign across social media, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Blue Sky, X, WhatsApp and Telegram.

We checked our internal sources to make sure that messages are being delivered to the employer.

And, at the request of the union, we added a link to donate to their fund — it appears on the campaign page.

Interns: The first of our Cornell ILR interns, Joanne, started work this week. The second, Dylan, will begin work on Monday.

Sorry that we missed one week, so this covers the last 14 days.

Philippines Kawasaki campaign: This went live today with over 1,400 supporters in the first few hours and translations into four languages — including the highly relevant Tagalog and Japanese.

Sri Lanka Next campaign: We had a call last week to discuss the possibility of doing this and are waiting to hear back from partners before taking the next steps.

Turkey teachers campaign: This was a win. We will share the full statement we received from the union via the Education International in another week or so.

Interns: The first of our two interns from Cornell University will begin work on Monday. The second should start about a week later.

Campaigns: We now have a big and prominent link for our supporters to share our campaigns on WhatsApp. We hope that this will help a lot in regions where the instant messaging app is more used than email.

Donations: BWI made another very generous donation to us.

This report covers three weeks as I was away on holiday for one of those weeks.

Azerbaijan campaign: This campaign was closed after more than three months online. Here is what the union told us: “The campaign received widespread attention, going viral in the news and drawing significant public interest. It even reached state-level awareness, Sara Rahimova was questioned about it during her interrogation while in detention this past April.”

Turkey campaign: We closed down our campaign in support of teachers and are waiting for an update from the union.

Canada: Derek made a presentation (by Zoom) about LabourStart to a group of 14 – 18 year-olds at a trade union summer camp in New Brunswick. We also contributed to a campaign by the Ontario Federation of Labour to help convince the Canadian government to allow prominent South African trade union leader Jay Naidoo to remain in the country.

Interns: We’ve heard from a couple of our new interns, who will begin work at the end of this month.

Serbia: We’ve heard from the Union of Free Trade Unions of Serbia (SSSS) and are looking into ways to support them. More details soon.

Sri Lanka: We are in discussions about ways to help workers at a factory that has been closed. More details soon.

Donations: We’ve received a generous donation from PSI.  We are still waiting to hear back from two other global unions.